


make each of your days a delight

by Kappa (Peahen)



Series: wrung from our inmost heart [1]
Category: Glowfic and Related Works, Wizard of the Grove - Tanya Huff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-12
Updated: 2019-02-12
Packaged: 2019-10-26 13:55:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 10,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17747141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Peahen/pseuds/Kappa
Summary: In the Age of Wizards, the world was ruled by seven unstoppably powerful immortal demigods who lived lives of near-total self-indulgence, restrained only by the desire to avoid going to war with each other. This did not turn out well for anyone involved; not even, ultimately, the wizards.If anyone in this story is a good person, you'd have a hard time proving it from the words on the page.





	1. Chapter 1

The legends say that the gods created mankind, but the truth is that mankind created the gods.

The Elder Races know the truth of it. Dwarves and dryads, giants and centaurs, the folk of leaf and stone and wind and water—they'll tell you, if you listen, if you don't offend them too badly, if you make it worth their time.

Before anything else, there was the Mother. You've heard of her, of course. She made the whole world, and when she was done she rested, and woke the first dryads from the trees in the birch grove where she lay in her exhaustion. That's why the dryads are called the Eldest.

After that she made the rest of the Elder Races, and I confess I have some trouble believing the next part. The story goes that since the Elder Races have no mortal spirit, they can't die, and the Mother made mankind to give her son Death something to do. First of all, if Death was already there before there was anything around that could die, how did anyone know what he was for? And second of all, maybe the Elder Races don't like to think about this, but I'm quite certain that they can die. Maybe not the same way we do, but that's a separate question.

Anyway. The story goes that the Mother made us, the last of all her children, and since we were so brief and frail and generally useless, she felt sorry for us and lent us some of her power to create. (Maybe the Elder Races are letting their opinions colour the tale a little here.) With that power, we made children of our own—another inconsistency, you'll notice, since without children we'd all have been dead in a century, and what sort of pathetic gift would that have been? "Here, son, have these humans. They'll last about a hundred years and then you can spend the rest of eternity being bored again." I think not.

But besides the children, we made stories. And our first and best and strongest stories, infused with the new fresh power of the Mother's creative will, took on a life of their own and became the gods.

For a long time, things went very well for us. The gods weren't perfect, because after all they were ours, and no human has ever made a perfect thing. But they were good and powerful and they helped. We built cities and figured out how to live in them and did all the things that civilization is good for, learned and danced and laughed and went to war. 

However, I'll draw your attention back to the fact that the gods were _human_ stories. And humans, given the opportunity, can have children with just about anything that speaks, particularly if it's more or less human in shape.

So the gods, not knowing any better, fucked mortal women. And those women gave birth to the wizards.

A god is a story come to life. Their power is the power we gave them, and it's limited only by our imagination but it _is_ limited. They lack the Mother's gift; like the Elder Races, they can be only what they are.

The wizards were different. Half god, half mortal, they had all that potential with none of those constraints. They surpassed their divine parents as soon as they bothered to try. Omnipotent children, scrapping and squabbling, toppling nations with a wave of a hand. The gods couldn't stop them; we mortals never stood a chance. The Mother, by that point, wasn't around to comment. By the time the eldest wizard turned twenty, there wasn't a speck of dirt left in this world that didn't belong to one or another of them.

They killed their divine parents, to eliminate the possibility of further competition. They fought amongst themselves with world-shaking power and armies of mortal slaves. They raised strongholds filled with deadly traps, and created new races as cruel experiments. If you've heard of the wer, they began as a wizard's project.

There were seven wizards, corresponding to the seven male gods. (No one's quite sure what happened to the female gods. Did the wizards kill them too? They certainly don't seem to have been any help.) And after murdering their fathers and working out a mostly stable division of territory, they started to get restless.

No one knows who had the idea first, but they made a competition of it, and none of them dared to be the one left out: they were going to conquer the last and greatest power this world has to offer. They were going to turn the Mother's own body to their ends. They were going to make dragons.

It's said that the Earth is the body of the Mother. Are you imagining a woman made of dirt? Well, stop that. Dirt and stone are plain things, with very little magic in them. Even mountains—well, most mountains—are just, when you get right down to it, very large rocks.

But if you dig deep enough, reach far enough, you can get under the dirt and into the _Earth_. The places where dwarves live. The stone from which mountains are born.

The wizards raised the Earth up from its rest. They carved new shapes from the primeval stone, majestic and beautiful, with wings and claws and scales like nothing else that ever lived. They breathed life into their creations, and prepared to use them as one more weapon, one more symbol of their power, one more piece in the game. Their final triumph.

But even a wizard's power can't tame the Mother's bones to any lesser will. In their hubris they no longer believed it was possible to defy them. They learned otherwise.

And that, more or less, is where our story begins.


	2. Chapter 2

It's not hard to tell who sent the messenger.

White silk robes, a pristine white horse shod in mirror-polished platinum, enchanted to repel the dust of the road. Blind white eyes stare blankly out of a paper-white face. The horse's saddle and caparison are white, decorated in white embroidery. The messenger's snow-white hair is bound up in an elaborate crown of braids.

Some people just can't stop themselves once they've got a theme going.

Ziraga frowns into his spy-window. Then he snaps his fingers. A slave hurries to kneel at his feet.

"Yes, Master?"

"Have someone sent out to greet Damas's messenger. Find out what he wants. If the messenger insists on speaking to me in person, I'm not opposed, but don't offer it unasked."

"At once, Master." The slave bows her head, rises gracefully, and backs out of the room. He contemplates calling for another one, but decides he isn't in the mood. Instead he steps out onto the balcony, takes a deep breath of the crisp autumn air, and turns into an eagle. A nice afternoon flight sounds like just the thing.

The forest spreads out around his tower like a wild green blanket. He calls the wind to his wings and soars, enjoying the peace and quiet of the unbounded sky. Below him, he can see his people, scurrying between the trees like prey animals. If he angled a dive just so, he could catch one. Like that pretty young man by the riverbank, slight enough to be snatched up in his talons and carried away.

He considers it, but—if Damas is sending him messengers he should really find out what that's about before he gets caught up in anything as time-consuming as a hunt. He wheels, trims his wings, and glides back down to the tower. Moments before his talons meet the stone of the balcony, he shifts back to his man-shape, not bothering with clothes.

The slave waiting in the viewing room bows. It's a different one from before, taller, more angular. "The messenger awaits you in the throne room, Master."

"Ugh," he sighs. "Have someone disposable sent to my rooms while I talk to him, I'm going to be annoyed afterward."

"Yes, Master." She bows again and disappears through the servants' portal at the back of the room.

The throne room is halfway up the tower, high enough to intimidate visitors but below all the really interesting parts. He exits the viewing room onto the landing of the central stair, vaults over the railing, and freefalls most of the distance, laughing at the feeling of wind in his hair. A flicker of power shifts him sideways enough to catch the lower rail of the banister and swing down onto the next turn of the stair, and he lands neatly in front of the wide double doors, which swing open at his touch.

Damas's messenger is standing perfectly still with his hands folded in front of him, already bowing his head as Ziraga takes his first step into the room. He does not display any sort of visible reaction to Ziraga's nakedness, neither distaste nor approval. It's not clear whether he even notices; it's hard to tell how much Damas's white-eyed servants can see, though they manage somehow to recognize important features of their environment like walls and wizards.

"Lord Ziraga," he says respectfully. "Lord Damas sends his regards."

"I'm sure he does," Ziraga says dryly. "Anything else?"

"My master invites you to attend a meeting of the Council of Wizards, at noon six days hence."

"A Council meeting on such short notice? Did he say what it was about?"

"Begging your pardon, Lord Ziraga—"

"Denied, but go on." He's pleased to see that alabaster form flinch slightly.

"—it is not for one such as I to know the business of the Council."

"But he mentioned something, and I'm going to have to pry it out of you by force because there's nothing Damas enjoys more than wasting other people's time. Mm?"

The messenger bows nervously. "Honored wizard, I am but a humble servant—"

"Stop."

He shuts up instantly, of course.

"Tell me everything you know about this meeting that you aren't directly forbidden to reveal, without wasting another word on formalities of any sort, and the same for any other news you're meant to convey to me, and I will let you turn around and leave my lands unharmed," he says. "Keep fucking around and I'll take you up to my dungeon and torture it out of you, and send you back to Damas in several small bags. Do you understand the choices that are available to you?"

The messenger trembles delicately. He's been well trained not to let fear get in the way of his work, but he can't hide it, not from Ziraga's eyes. He hesitates, opens his mouth as though to speak, hesitates again, and finally closes it and nods. A promising start; sometimes they hear all that and immediately try a formal apology on reflex, and then things get messy.

"Good," he says. "Continue."

The messenger takes a deep, steadying breath. "I am instructed to tell you the place and time of the meeting. I am instructed to tell you that it is an important meeting which all the wizards are meant to attend. Lord Damas has mentioned in my hearing, without any implication of secrecy, that the meeting is about coordinating all the wizards on a new project to demonstrate your power and mastery of the world. I am instructed to offer you the gift that my master sent with me, with his compliments on the continued prosperity of your lands and people. Your people directed me to leave the gift with my horse. It's a bottle of extremely rare and expensive wine. Lord Damas indicated that he expected you to break it or pour it out, and that he would not punish me for this outcome if I survived."

Ziraga raises his eyebrows slightly, impressed. "Well done. Most of Damas's messengers can't manage to get nearly that concise on the first try. Is that all?"

The messenger nods.

"Good. You can go. Tell Damas I'll be there. I won't insist you avoid putting words in my mouth, but you don't have to try too hard to make me sound reasonable; everyone knows I hate the entire concept of having manners."

The messenger bows again, and backs hurriedly out of the room.

That wasn't nearly as painful as Ziraga expected. But he contemplates the prospect of a Council meeting in six days, and decides he still needs some stress relief. He steps out onto the stairs, looks thoughtfully up their long golden spiral, and then turns into an eagle again and ascends the central column on the wing. His rooms are near the top; he lands, shifts, opens the door, and walks in.

There's a girl kneeling by his bed, naked, beautiful, and terrified. He inspects her as he approaches. Whoever they've got on procurement these days has a good eye; he must remember to arrange an appropriate reward next time he's in a generous mood.

"I haven't seen you before. Are you useful for anything?"

She shakes her head, trembling. "O-only to serve your pleasure, Master."

"Good. I don't like to waste useful things. Get on the bed."

She's clumsy about it, but goes where she's told. He stalks forward slowly, watching her. Her eyes flicker from his face to his hands to his crotch, and only once to the window. It's impressive. Maybe worth rewarding, even. He'll see how he feels.

He pauses at the edge of the bed, admiring the lovely picture she makes, curled up wide-eyed and shivering. Then he pounces. She cries out in fear and surprise, then bites her lip to forestall the next outburst.

"Make all the noise you like," he says. "I'm frightening. You're allowed to be frightened."

She acknowledges this instruction with a shallow nod. He considers whether or not to tell her she won't be punished for struggling, but decides against it. Sometimes they take that as an order to struggle, and it's so much less enjoyable when they're doing it on perceived command. He can get into the details next time, if he lets her live through this one.

He wraps a hand around her throat, leans his weight on it. She chokes, squirms, instinctively raises her hands to pry at his fingers—then freezes, wide-eyed with fear. He smiles down at her and shoves her legs apart. She shudders in terror, but keeps them spread as he mounts her.

"You're a good girl," he murmurs in her ear. "You're lovely." His fingers dig into her throat, and she makes a soft pained noise and clutches at the bedsheets with both hands, shaking. He enters her with a satisfied sigh, and fucks her slowly, keeping her pinned to the bed by her neck the whole time. Her fear is delicious. He can sense the tension of her effort to keep still for him, to open herself to him. She's so scared, and she's trying so hard. 

He tightens the hand on her throat. She makes tiny choked noises of pain, until she can't make noise any longer, and her hands twist in the sheets and she never, ever tries to push him away. Her cunt squeezes him like a clenched fist, tight with terror. He relaxes his grip a little, enough to let her breathe, so she won't pass out and go limp while he's still using her. Her eyes fill with tears, and she lets out a quiet, grateful sob. It's a beautiful sound. He fucks her harder. She flinches slightly, recoiling from the violent force of his thrusts, but keeps her legs spread and her hands at her sides. He chokes her again as he nears completion, and when her instincts finally overcome her will and her hands fly to her throat to claw weakly at his immovable hand, he spills his seed inside her at last.

He stays there a moment, lying atop her small soft fragile body with his hand on her neck and his cock buried deep in her cunt. Then he lets go, rolls off her, tucks an arm around her waist to pull her close against him, and breathes in the scent of her hair. She lies there tensely for a moment, then with tangible reluctance presses a little closer.

Smiling into her hair, he snaps his fingers.

"Yes, Master?" comes a voice from the foot of the bed.

"I like this girl," he says. "Take her off the disposable list. Let her kill herself if she wants to, but otherwise keep her healthy and available."

"As you command, Master."

"Mmm. And I want to talk to whoever found her. They're due a reward." He glances up to see the slave's nod of acknowledgment, then gestures dismissal.

The girl is shaking like a leaf. His cock stirs against her trembling thigh. She whimpers, very very quietly.

"You've done very well," he tells her, sliding his hand down her back in an idle caress. Her skin is soft and pale, already beginning to show bruises around her lovely throat.

"Thank you, Master," she whispers.

"I admire your resolve. Not many people can keep still like that for me." He pets her some more. "I won't punish you for failing, but I want to test that resolve a little."

She shudders. "Yes, Master. Thank you, Master."

He rolls her onto her back and ducks down to bite her shoulder. She gasps sharply, tenses, but doesn't pull away. And when he bites harder, until her blood flows freely onto his tongue, she flinches and shivers but holds herself still. And when he works his way up the side of her neck, leaving behind a trail of bleeding bite-marks, she tilts her head away slightly to offer him a better angle.

" _Very_ good." He nudges her knee, and she takes the cue and spreads her legs, shivering. He settles himself between them, but doesn't fuck her yet, instead sliding down to apply his teeth to her breasts. She manages not to flinch even when he draws blood, but gasps and whimpers and sobs and whines as he shows her all the different kinds of pain he can make her feel using only his mouth.

By the time he tires of that, his cock is achingly hard. He lifts his head and captures her gaze with his; she stares unflinchingly into his eyes.

"I could kill you," he says softly. "I won't, but I could. I hold your life in my hands."

Mesmerized, she whimpers in terror. Her fragile human mind shivers in the grip of his power; he isn't looking at her thoughts, but he can feel a faint reflection of her uncomprehending fear. He has to be careful, to use only the lightest touch, or he could crush her like a bug. Just enough pressure to completely capture her attention, to be sure she is thinking of nothing but him.

"I _will_ hurt you," he continues. "Very badly. I want you to know that."

With immense effort, she manages a tiny nod.

"I enjoy your fear and your pain. I'm going to fuck you again, and I'm going to make it hurt, and at any moment I could destroy you with a thought, and I want you to think about that because I want you to be terrified."

She takes a deep breath, and lets it out, and draws another. Her mind and body tremble with the strain of trying to speak. On the third try, she says in a soft shaky voice, "Yes, Master."

"You're a very, very good girl," he says, smiling faintly, and he releases her mind. She squeezes her eyes shut and lies there beneath him, shaking uncontrollably, with blood trickling from her clenched fists where she's closed them so tightly that her nails bite deep into her palms.

He moves closer. His cock brushes against her inner thigh, and she flinches back from the contact with a quiet, frightened gasp. He pauses there for a moment, then closes the final distance and drives his cock into her cunt.

She sobs once, then again, weeping raggedly with fear.

And she stubbornly spreads her legs wider.

He calls up a tiny fraction of his power, a fiery golden flicker just barely bright enough to be visible in his mind's eye, and he passes that tiny spark into her body where it joins to his. He isn't holding her mind anymore to watch the pain blossom there, but he's done this enough times before to know exactly what she's feeling. A flush of heat, and then a roaring blaze of agony in its wake. She screams, long and loud, and thrashes under him in raw unfettered panic, desperate to escape the torment. He holds her down effortlessly, fucks her mercilessly. Tears pour from her eyes; her screams mingle with sobs.

And yet, as the first wave of pain fades, she makes herself go still again. She cries out in anguish with every thrust, flinches and shudders and sobs, but she stays put.

There's something incredibly attractive about that. Both making her lose that control, and watching her claw her way back to mastery of her own body just so she can force it to submit to him.

He feeds her another spark of power. She falls apart again, squirming and crying. This time, when her struggles falter, it seems to be half willpower and half exhaustion. He does it a third time, and her voice gives out mid-scream, and he spends himself in her before she can gather her will to make herself stop squirming.

Once he's no longer moving on top of her, it takes her only a few seconds to calm herself again.

He withdraws, lifting himself off her, and she whimpers near-soundlessly at the pain. It's going to take a few hours until she can bear to be touched there again. 

Smirking, he reaches between her legs and presses gently on her sensitive parts with his fingers. She sobs and shivers but doesn't try to pull away.

"You're a good girl," he tells her softly, sitting up. "I've known few better."

He summons one more fragment of his power, and lets it wash over her in a gentle wave, healing all her mundane injuries but leaving the magical pain alone. Then he snaps his fingers again.

"Yes, Master?"

"Take good care of her. Every available luxury," he says. "She's earned it."

The slave nods, rises from his knees, and helps the bloodstained girl hobble out of his bed. With the pain spell so fresh, she can barely walk, flinching every time she takes a step. It's a lovely sight.

Another slave, waiting in the doorway, approaches to kneel by his bedside.

"You called for me, Master?"

"You're the one who found that girl?"

She nods.

"Stand up and look me in the eye," he says. She obeys immediately. He catches hold of her mind, and this time looks below the surface. 

She's frightened, of course, but she knows she's here to be rewarded. He sees her careful focus on the other slaves who helped bring this about—mostly in the administrative staff, creating and running a smooth efficient system to make sure that every human in his province will fall under a discerning eye at some point in their early adulthood, and double-checking to be sure they can be spared from their current place before they're called to his tower to await his pleasure—she's determined not to dishonestly award herself all the credit simply because she happened to be the one who saw this particular girl.

"I appreciate your honesty," he says. She shivers, awed by his presence and humbled by his regard. In her mind, she's lost in his eyes, drowning in an endless sea of gold. "Do you have a family you want protected?"

She does. A husband and two young children, six and four years old, living in the nearby town. She doesn't know how many boons her accomplishment is worth, but she feels faint with gratitude at the thought of winning safety for her son or daughter.

"One for you," he says, "to make sure I don't lose such a useful slave to carelessness, and one each for your children, because you made such an effort to be honest."

Tears of gratitude well silently in her unblinking eyes.

He lets her go, and she sways forward, but catches herself and straightens before she can fall into his lap. "Thank you, Master," she says softly.

He nods, shifts the fingernails of one hand to claws, and reaches up to draw a drop of blood from the hollow of her throat. When the red bead has grown to the size of a pea, trembling in the subtle grip of his power, it shimmers and transforms into a perfectly spherical, perfectly flawless ruby. He catches it as it falls and presses it into her hand.

"Get that set and strung on a chain," he says. "Wear it from then on. Do you understand how these work?"

She hesitates, then shakes her head.

"It's made from your blood; it belongs to you and only you. It has no magic of its own besides that, but as long as you wear it, you're marked as someone I've decided not to torture or kill without a damn good reason. Bring your kids sometime in the next few days and catch me when I'm in a good mood and not busy, and I'll do theirs too."

She sinks to her knees and bows her head deeply. "Thank you, Master."

He rests his hand on the back of her head and gently strokes her hair. Thinks about pulling her head into his lap and making her suck his cock, but he's sated enough after what he did to the other girl that it just doesn't seem like a worthwhile use of his time.

"You may go," he says instead, lifting his hand away. She rises to her feet and hurries out of the room.


	3. Chapter 3

There are many, many reasons why Ziraga hates going to Council meetings. He doesn't like politics; he doesn't like other wizards, as a concept or on an individual basis; engaging in politics with other wizards is even more annoying than the first two items taken together would suggest; and it's inconvenient to travel so far from his tower, away from his pretty bed-slaves and the well-trained servants who rush to attend his every whim.

But perhaps the most petty irritation of them all—and yet a surprisingly difficult one to ignore—is the fact that he has to put on _clothes_.

At home he dresses up exactly when he feels like it. At Council meetings—well, he's already pushing the bounds of tolerable behaviour, and it's been made clear to him several times that if he gets much ruder there's going to be a war about it. Showing up naked to an important diplomatic occasion would probably qualify. And wars, unfortunately, are even more annoying than having to wear clothes on someone else's schedule.

So he puts on clothes—real clothes, with leather transmuted from pine bark and rubies transmuted from blood—and arrives six hours early, and checks his Council chair over carefully for any lethal pranks the others might have left there, and checks everyone else's while he's at it, and dismantles a nasty spell that would have trapped Aryalan in a power vortex as soon as she sat down. With the initial inspection complete, he sits down and has a nap. In Aryalan's chair.

He wakes, some time later—a glance at the sky suggests it's still two or three hours until the meeting time—to the sound of Damas delicately clearing his throat.

"Mm?" he says, yawning pointedly.

"You might wish to take your seat, Lord Ziraga."

He laughs, and gets up, and saunters over to his chair. It's not as comfortable as Aryalan's; if he let himself have that many cushions, he'd be falling asleep during the meetings themselves. No, instead he built himself a gold-plated obsidian throne, decorated by carving the gold away in thin curling lines to reveal the black glass beneath.

Damas takes a seat on his throne of white marble, at the head of the table. What idiot decided the Council should be seated in seniority order? Oh, that's right, it was Damas. 

Thankfully, the eldest wizard lets the hours pass in silence instead of trying to engage Ziraga in small talk.

Third to arrive is Galvar, an eight-foot-tall slab of solid muscle looking as ridiculous as ever in his forest-green robe with red accents. Say what you like about Damas overcommitting to the white-on-white look, at least white doesn't clash with itself. At least the man's seat is solid unpainted mahogany; he'd look even worse if he tried to colour-coordinate the chair.

"Good morrow," says Damas, and Galvar grunts and drops into his chair. The floor shudders slightly under the impact.

Next is willowy Iraz, looking like a fragile icicle in blue and silver, perching on the twist of clear glass he uses as his Council seat. Then Kraydak, short for a wizard at a flat six feet, matching his chair in an ensemble of gold-accented blue. Then the petite Aryalan, in red-accented black, who glances suspiciously at Ziraga but takes her seat without comment. Finally, round-faced Endravi in red and purple takes her seat just as the sun crests the sky.

"I call this meeting to order," says Damas. All around the table, wizards sit up straighter and lean forward. Ziraga remains in his comfortable sprawl, halfway out of his chair with his face just barely high enough to see over the table's edge. Everyone glares at him. He shrugs and pushes himself upright, then looks at Damas expectantly.

"First, does anyone have business they would like to raise with the Council?"

Ziraga lifts a hand. Damas blinks at him, taken aback. "Ah—yes, Lord Ziraga?"

"I move that you get to the point already," he says dryly. A ripple of quiet laughter circles the room.

A pale flush of anger touches Damas's normally bloodless face. "Anyone _else_?" 

"Seconded," Endravi says lazily.

Damas clears his throat and takes the time to glare at everyone again in case they missed how annoyed he is. Then he says stiffly, "Very well. As some of you already know, it has been my opinion for centuries that the wizards are stagnating. We have conquered the world, destroyed the gods, driven the Elder Races into hiding where we did not enslave or destroy them, barred Lord Death himself from our presence, and now we rule unopposed over all that lies within our reach. What, then, remains to challenge us? What more can we do to assert our dominion?"

Ziraga shrugs. Galvar looks as bored as he is; Endravi is gazing at the ceiling; Aryalan hides her feelings behind her usual enigmatic smirk; but Kraydak is leaning forward thoughtfully, and Iraz is tapping his fingers on the glittering abstract curl of an armrest.

"We can conquer the Earth itself," Damas intones.

Ziraga blinks at him, then glances around the table to see if everyone else is as confused as he is. Only Kraydak seems to have a clue. Fine, if no one else is going to ask, he'll do it.

"In... what sense?"

"Each of us—for of course I would never suggest that we leave any of our number behind—will delve into the deep Earth, raise the primeval stone that the Mother formed from her own body, and shape that stone into a powerful servant. I've done some preliminary investigations, and I believe it to be possible."

"Huh," says Ziraga. He contemplates this prospect. It sounds exhausting, but... it could be interesting, having an immortal slave carved from the Mother's own bones. And of course, if any one of them creates a servant as powerful as this, all the rest will have to do the same. The balance of power demands it.

Time to ask the next question no one else is willing to put their voice to.

"How do we know you're not setting us up?" he says bluntly.

"I'll share all my notes, of course," Damas assures him, with only the delicate quirk of an eyebrow to loudly imply to everyone at the table that he is far too polite to question whether Ziraga can read. Ugh.

"Lord Ziraga has a point," Iraz contributes, "however indelicately phrased. We should be sure we all understand the principles at play before moving forward."

 _Ugh._ When he gets home, he decides, he is going to open up the ballroom and host an orgy, and he'll spend three days straight watching beautiful men gang-rape beautiful women while highly trained concubines suck his cock. And maybe, just maybe, that will be enough to soothe his temper after the amount of provocation it's going to endure today.

"I don't see why we should do such a thing in the first place," Endravi objects in her slow dreamy voice. "What need have we to prove our mastery? Who is left to contest it?"

"Why, each other, of course," Kraydak says smoothly. "A little healthy competition keeps us from losing our edge."

"Sounds tiresome."

Ziraga smiles. Endravi's all right, most of the time. He can respect her dedication to laziness.

"I think it's a fine idea," says Aryalan. "What shall we call them?"

"Are you aware of the myth of the chimere?" asks Damas. Six blank looks appear around the table, although Ziraga thinks he remembers hearing the word somewhere before. "A mortal tale, from late in the age of the gods. Stone beasts, carved in fantastic shapes, brought to life by magic or the grace of the Creator. The greatest of them were called—"

"—Dragons," Ziraga interrupts, in a sudden flash of memory. It was one of his favourite stories as a child. He loved to think of those vast stone wings.

Everyone at the table turns to look at him. Endravi seems puzzled, Galvar bewildered, Damas offended, and Kraydak is trying not to laugh.

"What?" he says defensively. "I've read books."

"I'm sure none of us would call that into question," says Damas, struggling to reclaim the flow of the conversation. "But yes, that was the idea I had. A creature of stone imbued with such powerful magic that it becomes able to take wing and fly. It seems appropriate."

For once in his life, Ziraga finds himself in full agreement with the most annoying man in the world. "I'm in favour," he says.

With Damas and Ziraga both on board, Endravi's halfhearted objections are soon overruled. The wizards come to an astonishingly quick consensus. Ziraga suspects that under their varyingly reluctant facades they're all as eager as he is to wrestle with the power of primeval stone. There _is_ something to be said for the idea of a proper challenge after all this time.

Damas shares his notes, and they discuss them for the rest of the day and well into the night. They agree unanimously to pursue the project over the course of the coming year, and if all goes well, the plan is that each will choose a point in their territory to create their own dragon, working separately but simultaneously, beginning the final crafting on the first day of autumn. The unspoken rationale, which Ziraga for once manages not to make explicit, is that they need to create their dragons at the same time to minimize the interval between the first successful dragon-raising and the last, and need to create their dragons in private so that none of them can use the opportunity to attack someone else while they're weakened by the effort. That way none of them will be in a position to easily conquer or be conquered by the rest.

Being a wizard is so exhausting sometimes. The only thing that would be worse is, well, _not_ being a wizard.

Anyway, after a day and a half of intensive discussion during which they all burn power to avoid being the first to call a break to sleep or eat, Ziraga feels like he actually has a handle on the basic principles involved. The first day of autumn honestly sounds like too generous a margin; he's going to get impatient by then. But not nearly impatient enough to actually try making his dragon ahead of schedule... probably. No, definitely. Wars are _annoying_.

Damas formally concludes the Council meeting, and Ziraga takes his eagle shape and heads home without bothering to stay for the banquet. He has an afterparty of his own to arrange.


	4. Chapter 4

When he lands on the roof of his tower, there's a slave kneeling there waiting for him. He wonders idly whether they had lookouts searching the sky for a black-and-gold eagle, or if they've been taking it in shifts.

He resumes his normal shape, grabs the girl's head, and stuffs his cock in her mouth. She chokes and cries, tears running down her face as he fucks her throat. It's lovely; by the time he finishes, he's starting to feel better already.

"I want an orgy," he says. "Disposable participants, ideally, but not going out of their way to kill each other, I just want to see a little blood and know I won't be disrupting anything important if I join in. And proper trained courtesans to keep me occupied while I watch; I won't kill those. Arrange it."

"Yes, Master," the slave manages between coughs, bowing her head and waiting a moment before she rises to her feet. He lets her take the time; it would be stupid to scare her into running off while she's still dizzy. That's how you get slaves falling down the stairs and cracking their heads open before they can pass on their orders.

He takes the long way down the tower, to give his slaves time to get things set up. Still, he's surprised by how far along they are when he emerges from the final turn of the spiral stair into the ballroom at the base of the tower. There's a raised dais with a couch for him to sit on, a table by the couch with tea and fruit and bread and wine, another larger table tucked into the curve of the opposite wall with food and drink for the participants, and slaves in the black-and-gold uniform of tower staff bringing in ropes and pillows and sex furniture and frightened naked women.

Smiling to himself, he takes a seat on the couch. A slave immediately breaks away from the bustling crowd to kneel at his feet.

"How'd you manage to get all this going so quickly?" he asks.

"We guessed that you'd want something like this, Master, so we made arrangements ahead of time."

"Good thinking. I'll want to reward someone for it. Afterward, though; I still have some frustrations to work out."

"Yes, Master."

He remembers Damas's stupid smug fucking face, and growls under his breath. The slave kneeling in front of him shivers in fear, but leans forward slightly, a silent question. He nods. She leans forward the rest of the way and puts her mouth to work, and he watches the preparations and absently pets her hair. Wizards are annoying and politics is annoying and wizard politics is extra double annoying but at least he has his tower and his magic and his lovely clever obedient helpful slaves.

A few minutes pass by. Someone leads a pair of women over to his couch, both naked except for pretty amber earrings; one of them settles in against his side and offers him a plate of orange slices from the snack tray, while the other kneels in front of him and smoothly takes over sucking his cock. She's much better at it than the palace servant. He sighs contentedly and gestures to dismiss the servant; it's not as though there's a shortage of those around if he needs something.

The sun sinks in the sky; its light grows dimmer, its shadows stretch. Ziraga waves a hand at the chandelier hanging over the center of the room, and in a blaze of gold all the candles flare to life.

Soon afterward, the show begins.

A tall handsome man drags a terrified struggling girl to the center of the room. He ties her down on her hands and knees, on a wooden pedestal made for the purpose, and makes her choke on his cock while another man steps up behind her. Ziraga makes an approving sound and takes a sip of tea. More slaves crowd around the first three, some playing with each other while they wait their turn, careful to make sure that Ziraga always has an unobstructed line of sight to any sex or violence taking place. A man starts beating the central girl with a leather strap, making her squirm and cry out. Two of the male slaves stroke each other's cocks while they watch the main event. A woman lies on a low divan with another woman's head between her legs. 

Ziraga's slaves are the _best_.

And it gets even better. Three men force a woman to squat on a spiked iron rod, then take turns fucking her face while blood drips down the metal between her legs. A servant brings a long knotted whip to another part of the room where a man is tied to a post and beaten; the whip flays the skin from his back in scattered red stripes, and his screams cut across the background noise of whimpering and sobbing and moaning.

The central girl is bleeding too, by this point, slumped in dizzy defeat with seed dripping from both ends, blood trickling down her sides from the relentless beating of her back. The man whipping her drapes his bloody strap across her shoulders  and takes his turn at her cunt. Someone else picks it up and hits her again.

Everywhere he looks, something beautiful is happening. The woman sitting on the spiked rod whimpers in pain around the cock in her mouth; the rod is thrusting slowly upward, retreating, then thrusting again, driven by the turn of a crank attached to the base from which it projects. Someone comes up behind the woman turning the crank, slaps her ass, and drags her away to fuck her on a nearby rug; one of the men waiting in line for the bleeding woman's mouth solves this by putting her hands on the crank and making her turn it herself, which she does with deep reluctance and a continual shudder of pain.

Ziraga finds that he likes that one especially. He thinks of calling for a servant and telling them to arrange more like it, but before he lifts his hand, he sees that they have anticipated his desires: two people are carrying in another contraption, a flat wooden frame with a spiked rod mounted at one end, arranged so that a girl can lie along the frame with the rod inside her. 

The servants set it down, and a man drags a woman over to it and wrestles her onto the frame against her vocal protests; a servant helps tie her down, lying on her back with her head hanging off the end of the frame at just the right angle for someone to use her mouth. The crank is placed so as to be easily operated by whoever is fucking her face; the man shoves his cock down her throat and applies himself vigorously to its use, turning the handle fast enough that the spiked metal rod fucks her in rhythm with his vicious thrusts. She chokes and bleeds and cries.

Ziraga snaps his fingers and murmurs to the appearing servant, "A reward for whoever invented those, after I'm done watching."

"Yes, Master."

He puts a hand on the head of the slave sucking his cock. She has lovely hair, thick and soft; he buries his hands in it to pull her down while he fucks her mouth. Her throat works around him with professional grace. He thrusts deep, deeper, holding her down until even her well-trained body trembles for need of air; then his seed spills down her throat and he lets go. She withdraws, imperfectly concealing the deep unsteady breaths she takes as soon as she can; the other trained girl moves down to take her place, and a servant appears to take over the duty of offering him food and drink while the first girl recovers. It all happens so smoothly he hardly notices.

His slaves are _so_ good.

A full day passes like this, sundown to sundown, new slaves coming in to replace the initial set as they become too exhausted or injured to continue, before he finally falls asleep right there on the couch. 

When he wakes, there's a dozing slave curled up at his side, another one lying along the couch with her head pillowed in his lap. The orgy is still ongoing, although about half the slaves in the room are asleep and the rest are pleasuring each other gently and quietly so as not to wake him with their noises or waste their blood spilling it when he isn't watching.

He smiles, and stretches, and pets the girls sleeping on the couch with him. The one with her head in his lap blinks awake, yawns, and gives his cock a sleepy kiss. He strokes her face encouragingly. She settles in to suck him, moving in a slow lazy rhythm; another time he might have been impatient with that, but in this moment it's perfect.

The other girl wakes, too, and sits up and reaches for the refreshments table, offering him a plate of fruit slices before she takes any for herself. He pets her lovely soft hair and takes a few pieces of apple, then turns his attention to the rest of the room.

Now that he's awake, things are starting to pick up again. The very first girl to be tied up and raped is still there, passed out in place, covered in blood; a couple of men who have been taking turns sucking each other's cocks get up and walk over to her. One man starts fucking her without bothering to wake her up; the other slaps her face a few times, then shoves his cock in her mouth just as she's beginning to stir. She chokes and splutters. Ziraga smiles.

The two spiked-rod contraptions are also still there, though currently unoccupied. A man who has been holding a woman in his lap and lazily fingering her picks her up and carries her over to the more elaborate one. She starts struggling as soon as she sees where he's taking her. It's moderately impressive, watching him strap her squirming body into the frame. She whimpers in pain when the spiked rod enters her, and then the man forces her head back and shoves his cock down her throat and pulls hard on the crank, driving the rod into her cunt with a wet tearing sound that Ziraga enjoys very much.

It's a lovely lazy morning, relaxing on a couch watching his slaves rape and torture each other for his amusement. He eats bread and fruit and drinks tea and wine and pets the beautiful woman who's sucking his cock, and by midmorning he's hardly thinking about Damas's stupid smug face at _all_. Yes, this is much better.

He lets the trained girls switch out who is sucking him off and who is feeding him snacks. Things are getting more exciting now, and he encourages the girl with her head in his lap to move a little faster by pushing her head down until she starts to choke. She's very responsive to this suggestion.

He contemplates the orgy of rape and violence going on in front of him, then snaps his fingers.

"Yes, Master?"

He points at the central figure, half-conscious and bleeding. "Bring me that girl. I want to fuck her to death."

"At once, Master."

The servant beckons to two more uniformed slaves waiting by the door, and they all make their way across the room quickly and efficiently. The men currently raping the girl release her at once, and help untie her. She stumbles dizzily when they drag her to her feet, and they half-lead, half-carry her to Ziraga's couch. He pushes the concubine's head away and collects the dazed bleeding girl to replace her, gathering her in close to straddle his lap. Her cunt is dripping with a dozen men's seed; her face and thighs are streaked with it. It's a lovely sight. He holds her face in his hands and looks into her eyes.

Her thoughts are scattered, a dreamy haze of pain and exhaustion. His presence overwhelms her utterly. Moments after they make contact, the only thing showing on the surface of her mind is the reflection of his fire-gold eyes. There's no space in her for fear, or pain, or awe. There is only him.

He smiles, and keeps one hand cupping her face while the other strokes her whipped-raw back. It's fascinating, watching little eddies of pain swirl at the fringes of her thoughts.

Slowly, carefully, he pulls back the contact, gives her back more and more of herself. His touch on her mind becomes light, gentle, more support than pressure. Fear returns to her first, and then pain, and then a deep and desperate awe. In this moment, she worships him with all her soul. 

With one hand still on her face, he wraps the other around her hip and pulls her down onto his cock.

It hurts her. But caught in his gaze as she is, she couldn't struggle even if she wanted to. She is helpless in his power and she knows it.

"I'm going to kill you," he tells her.

She trembles in awe and terror.

"You suffered so beautifully for me. I'm going to make you suffer more, and then you're going to die, terrified and in pain, wrapped around my cock."

She's so, so scared. She doesn't want to hurt, she doesn't want to die, she doesn't want his cock inside her—but she knows she can't stop it, no more than she could turn the sun back along its course. There's a kind of peace in that.

"Please... please don't," she whispers, throwing all her will into the effort to speak. "Please, Master..."

He smiles again. She's so beautiful.

And—carefully, slowly—he reveals to her a glimpse of his own thoughts. How enthralled he is by her pain and her fear. How much pleasure she's brought him, how much he's going to enjoy killing her.

Tears of anguish and despair well in her eyes and spill down her face.

He digs his fingers into her thigh, slides his other hand down from her cheek to wrap around her throat, and fucks her. It is not careful or gentle or slow. It's hard and fast and violent and only his power keeps her eyes locked to his. But he sees every moment of her glorious agony, sees her thoughts scatter again as her face darkens with trapped blood, sees her slow slide into death.

In her last moments of consciousness, he sends a spark of power into her cunt. 

She can't scream; she has neither the will nor the air. She makes a tiny sound instead, the smallest softest choked little whimper imaginable, and then she's gone, and he spills his seed in her body as her spirit leaves it.

He tosses her onto the floor, to be collected by the servants, and settles back on the couch to pet his concubines some more. They cuddle up to his sides with only a slight tremor of fear.

"That's enough," he decides. "Hold a feast for the survivors. It was a very good orgy."

"Yes, Master," says a servant. He lets his eyes drift shut, buries his hands in his slaves' lovely soft hair, and finally starts thinking about dragons.


	5. Chapter 5

Dragons, it turns out, are difficult.

Well, if they'd been easy, Damas wouldn't have suggested them.

Ziraga spends an unprecedented amount of time on magical experiments and research in the months following the meeting. He even attends a second meeting, called by Galvar, who is having even more trouble with the concepts than he is. For the sake of maintaining the balance of power, and because it's nice to be the more knowledgeable wizard in the conversation for once in his life, he gives Galvar a considerable amount of help. Endravi helps both of them. Kraydak drops by to make snide comments, and then Aryalan shows up to flirt with Kraydak, and Ziraga goes home in disgust when it's clear that nothing further is going to be accomplished through their interference. But he finds, when he gets home, that explaining things to Galvar left him with a firmer grasp of the ideas himself.

After torturing a slave to death to calm his temper, he gets back to work.

At its heart, raising a dragon is a simple procedure, both theoretically and practically. You pull some primeval stone out of the ground, you give it shape, you give it life, and you force your will on it to bind it to your service. The details, though, can get surprisingly tricky. How deep do you need to dig to find primeval stone, and how do you know when you've got it? Are there some parts of the world where the Mother's bones are higher quality or nearer to the surface than in others? How do you shape it into a form that will be able to hold the life you give it, and where do you get that life? 

Galvar suggested sacrificing a slave, or maybe several slaves, but Ziraga pointed out to him that the thing you get when you sacrifice a slave is _death_ and life and death are in point of fact opposites. No, if you want your dragon to be a truly worthy servant, you need to give it a piece of your own power, ripped right from the source. And not a small one, either. No wonder Damas wanted everyone to make their dragons alone and in secret. One wizard holding back at the last moment could turn and slaughter the rest while they recovered from their work.

He picks his spot, and sets up extensive wards. No one and nothing is getting into this valley without his personal guidance. 

Autumn slides into winter, and winter into spring, and spring into summer, and with surprising speed, the day of the dragon-raising approaches. He was right that he'd be bored, but wrong about how soon; if the date had been set for the first day of summer, he'd have had to scramble to be ready in time.

It's a cold morning. He wakes early. The sky looks soft, and cool mist strokes his feathers as he flies from the tower.

In the valley, everything is quiet. He takes his human shape and puts both hands against the ground. Closes his eyes, hums a low note, and _reaches_ —

The stone of the Earth's beginning is buried very, very deep. But it's there, if you know where to look. If you keep pushing and pushing until you're not sure there's any of you left to push with.

He is a wizard, and in this world there is no greater power.

And there, at the very edge of his reach, is the stone. More of it than he could possibly hope to grasp.

He finds a piece that looks like it might come away from the rest with sufficient force, wraps his mind around it, and pulls hard. The ground creaks. A grinding rumble shakes his body, felt more than heard. And up it comes, thirty tons of dark mottled stone, studded with black garnet.

As soon as the earth stops shaking, he crawls over to the stone and half-collapses against it. It's warm. Nearly burning hot, in fact. But he presses his face into its rough unyielding surface anyway. It's _his_. He did this. The first step in conquering the body of the Creator herself.

He has to take an hour to rest before starting on the next part. He curls up in the dirt next to his massive lump of rock and dozes, dreaming of vast black wings. But he can't nap all day, or he'll be the last wizard to finish his dragon, and he won't hear the end of it for another ten centuries. 

So. He stands up, leans on his stone, presses his hands against it. It hums with quiet power. He closes his eyes and goes still, quiet, listening. It has... a pulse, almost, a slow steady rhythm. He listens with his mind until he's caught the beat of it, a hundred times slower than his heart, and then he reaches out with his power and starts the shaping.

When hard things bend, they make heat. The stone gets hot again, enough to sting his hands and face, then to burn them. He ignores it. He's not an academic like Damas, or a craftsman like Iraz, or a cheater like Kraydak who'll bury a problem under a heap of corpses until it goes away. To Ziraga, magic is a part of his body, and he gets his best results when he holds his work in his own hands.

Slowly, his dragon takes shape.

Four dextrous feet, two great arching wings, a long neck and tail that balance each other nicely. The details are still a little rough, but he makes sure the proportions are perfect. Adding life will smooth over small issues, but he refuses to create a dragon who will go around forever with one leg longer than the rest, or anything of that nature.

When he's sure he's got it right, he... contemplates his exhaustion, sighs, and takes another nap. 

_Then_ he starts in on the hard part.

Breathing life into his new servant _hurts_. He's giving away a part of himself, and it feels every bit as painful as if he was gouging out strips of flesh to feed to the stone beast. But he does it. He pours his own power, his heart and soul, into the ancient stone; and a ripple of golden fire passes over the rough-sculpted scales, and in its wake, they're sharp and slick and perfect, a glossy reddish black. He takes a deep breath and gathers his will, staring into the dragon's eyes as it opens them for the first time. The final test, now: mastering the creature and binding it to his service for all eternity.

Her eyes are vast golden pools, exactly like his own, and the will behind them is as deep as the roots of mountains.

He stumbles back, blinking—he's surprised she even let him blink—she isn't, actually, _fighting_ him, and he finds himself releasing the gathered tension of his mind without ever using it. He doesn't want to hurt her. He doesn't understand what's happening but he's very sure about that part. Her thoughts are gentle, curious, confused, and he reaches up and lays his burned hands on the sides of her glittering armored face. He...

He loves her.

He feels about her the way he's seen so many slaves feel about their children. And didn't he bring her into the world? Didn't he give her life with his own power, his own body?

"My daughter," he says softly.

The soft skin around her eyes crinkles in a dragon's smile.

He wraps his arms around her snout and closes his eyes, hugging her with all his strength. Even without looking into her eyes, he can still sense her mind, can touch it if he reaches out just a little. He does that. He wants her to know that he loves her. It's so, so important that she know that he loves her.

She tells him that she loves him too.

Well, now he's hugging his dragon and crying. This is not at all how he expected this afternoon to go.

Vast black wings sweep inward to wrap gently around him. She's very warm. He feels—held and comforted and _safe_ —safer than he would have imagined it might be possible to feel, standing next to something so huge and powerful that he does not even slightly control.

"My daughter," he murmurs, "my beautiful daughter—I'm so sorry I meant to enslave you—I could never hurt you—I love you so much..."

She nuzzles him very gently with her great head, and makes a deep earthquake rumble that after a moment's confusion he identifies as her equivalent of a gentle purr. He laughs softly, hiccups, buries his tear-streaked face against hers. The top of her long snout has a graceful inward curve that makes a perfect place to rest his head.

"I love you," he whispers. "I love you, I love you, I love you." He didn't know he could love like this. It almost hurts, to feel this much. But he never wants to give it up. She's the most precious thing in the world.

The other wizards, he realizes, are definitely not going to treat their dragons this way.

They'll fight - and if all the dragons are as strong as this one, the wizards aren't sure to win. Today marks the start of a big, ugly, world-shaking war. The wizards won't hold back like they do with each other, and the dragons won't have any reason to do less, and—

"Fuck," he says aloud, hugging his daughter's snout tighter for a moment. "Things are about to get difficult. We should get back to my tower."

She sends him the mental image of herself, flying, with him riding on her back.

"Good idea." He hugs her again, then climbs up to sit between her wings, wrapping his arms around her neck. She launches herself into the air, clearing in a few wingbeats a distance that would have taken his eagle form several minutes. He envies her a little, for the grace and power of her body; but he's proud, too, to have made a daughter so majestic and strong.

He should name her. Parents name their children, he's fairly sure. He tries to think of something that sounds right. How will he know what sounds right? What if she doesn't like it...? Well, if she doesn't like it he can pick something else.

"Farolai," he says, a little tentatively. The sound is snatched away by the wind, but she hears it in his mind, and she likes it. A good name. Pretty.

He presses his face into her scaly neck and holds tight. Whatever else happens, he's glad he made her. Of all the things he's ever done, this one makes him proudest and happiest by far. 


End file.
